What was the most disturbing thing you've ever seen in your whole life?

I found a human arm as a kid… When I told people… it vansihed…

@talljasperman What happened to the arm?

It just vanished… none could find it… and people thought I was nuts… I found it right between two trees next to my home… I held that in for years…really messed me up for awhile

Joe Biden

GQ – I’ve seen a lot – not sure. Thinking about it.

Once while hiking in the Pennines one spring, I climbed over a stile, dropped down on the other side, both feet right into the carcass of a sheep that looked as though it had been lying there for the entire winter. However bad it looked (maggots crawling all over it), the stench that came up after my feet landed in it’s belly was far worse. I puked. A lot. And I threw the boots away when I got home.

I once stumbled across a tramp taking a dump in a bus shelter. “Bum Bum Bum rough!” As Disney would have said :¬(

Kidz bop commercials.

I once came across the end result of a man on a motorcycle vs a car accident….watching that man die in front of me blew. Nothing you could do for what was left of him. Wearing a helmet would not have saved him but would have made less of a mess. But that was nothing compared to what I saw in the living room of my uncle who took his life with a .45 I will never ever forget being called by my cousin to come help him. I still hate my uncle for that.

My friend’s 5 year old boy crying and trying to wake his dead dad up at his funeral.

When I was a young teen, I went hiking with my grandpa into the woods behind their house, really far in where my family’s old campgrounds had been. The outhouse was still standing, and I made the mistake of opening the door to peek in. Laying on the floor was a half-decomposed cat, his body melding into the floorboards…he must have gotten in through the small window at the top and was unable to get out, and starved to death. It stayed with me for awhile…cats are my favorite animal and I felt so bad for him, he must have suffered for a long time before finally dying :(

As a traffic investigator, one morning i answered an auto crash on a two lane road. this road is known for a just a few accidents, but when one occurs, it’s usually a fatality. this call was no exception. it was a foggy morning and visibility was low. as i arrived at the scene, i noticed a vehicle had hit a bridge abuttment….headon. nothing on the planet could have prepared me for what i was about to see. the driver, the mother, was wearing her seatbelt, when the crash occured. her seven yeor old daughter was not wearing her seatbelt. upon the sudden impact crash, the seven year old daughter was thrown through the windshied of her mothers car. the autos glass cut her from her throat down to her pelvic region. she was pronounced dead at the scene. i use to think about this accident quite often. it’s one of the worst traffic accidents i have worked.

A child died across the street in front of my house. Got hit by a car while helping his/her grandmother collect aluminum cans on the street. I didn’t know the people or even the gender of the child. Died instantly as she was hit by a car going 55 mph. What was the grandmother thinking taking her grandchild to collect cans on a dangerous road like that? I’m sure the pain and guilt of losing her grandchild is punishment enough. I wonder how the relationship is between her and the parents of the grandchild. I don’t know if it was her son or daughter’s child. Could anyone every look at their parents the same way again after their parents caused the death of their child? I’m not going to judge either side because that was a huge tragedy. To judge anyone involved would be wrong.

A friend and I were walking around a lake in Minneapolis, when we saw a duck with her ducklings in the water causing a disturbance. There was something wrong with one of the ducklings; its head was tilted over, as if its neck had been broken. The mother was jumping onto the duckling. At first, we thought that the mother was attacking whatever underwater creature was causing harm. After several minutes, it became apparent that the mother was attempting to drown her duckling. Some instinct must have told her that it had no chance of survival and that it would be better off dead.

Years later, I watched a documentary about a woman who murdered her two sons who were suffering from Huntington’s Disease. It was the same incurable illness that took her husband’s life. (Here is the story in case anyone is interested.)

The reason that these examples are so disturbing is because the mothers clearly must have felt love for their offspring. No parent wants to see their child die before they do. Yet in these cases, they chose to put the needs of those that they cared deeply for by putting them out of their misery.

Back in the early 90’s, I worked for an attorney who did a lot of accident cases. I often had to sort accident scene photographs and mark them as exhibits. The worst one I ever saw wasn’t the goriest. A family of five had been leaving church when their car was hit by a speeding cement truck working on a project in the median. It killed the father, teenage son and daugher, horribly crippled the mother and gravely injured their infant. In one photo, tangled in a pile of wreckage was the foot of the teenage daughter. You couldn’t see anything else of her but her foot, which was pristine. No blood, no gore. She had red nail polish on her toes. Every time I put on toenail polish or see someone else’s I think about that girl. Every time. So, basically, I’m reminded of it constantly. I’ve seen lots worse (people shot in the face with a shotgun, much gorier crime/accident scenes), but that’s the one that stuck with me.

Most of the disturbing things I’ve seen have been on the internet either through video or pictures, but with my own two eyes, I’ve seen some pretty disturbing behavior at a few parties including walking in on a few of my friends playing a ‘cutting game’ and seeing which person could cut their forearm the deepest and longest and who could bleed the most.

I’ve walked in on a former best friend vomiting numerous times because she was bulimic.

When I visited Hawaii when I was 12, a man drowned at one of the beaches and I witnessed most of it including his dead body up close when they pulled him out of the water. He was ghostly white, eyes half open and had massive gashes on his back because he was trying to climb up onto the rocks in a cove and repeatedly fell back into the strong current.

And back in high school, on my drive home, an accident had just taken place of a vehicle that ran over a woman pushing a baby in a stroller. The woman survived, but the baby had died and the stroller was entangled in the middle of the road and there was blood on the pavement. That was horrible.

Seeing my friend after her husband beat the crap out of her in the hospital. Her face was bearly recognizable. Thank god she got help and left.

During my freshman year at university, I was taking the bus home when our driver stopped at a red light next to the aftermath of a motorcycle accident. The person was missing their right shoe. Everyone on the bus was staring as though it were our own private freak show, but I kept looking for the matching pair to the red sneaker. The onlookers surrounding the motorcyclist from the street just stood there. Our driver later informed us that nobody had reported the accident. He was the first to call in to have an ambulance dispatched.

I messaged all my motorcycle buddies and begged them to stay safe on the road. One of them messaged me back and promised to send me a message every now and then to say he was alive. He’s alive.

The most disturbing thing I’ve watched was a video leak of the Dnepropetrovsk spree killings. I was gathering research for a story I am writing, and was not aware that one of the pages was going to play video of the murder without any warning.

when my little bro ran out side naked

Two junkies who overdosed would be a pretty high contendor. that was when I was about 8 years old. I still remember the cops poking the corpses with their night sticks, saying “naa, their dead”.

If perhaps you mean weird, then i would have to go with the crazy guy at a night club i worked at, who was so off his head on something he was trying to catch light in a glass ashtray.

I also had a job for a while doing clean up after a suicide at the rail tracks, but that was actually not bad at all. we would get called out in the middle of the night, get in a big 4×4 with big lights and go looking for the “corpse”. but really all we ever found where chunks, you see far worse at the meat counter in the supermarket.

When I was about 8 or 9 years old I was on holiday with my family in Glen Esk and was watching sheep being ‘dipped’ to protect them from disease. One of the animals horrified me as its head had been injured and the wound was full of wriggling maggots. The farm workers had pulled it aside to treat it. It was otherwise very healthy and I was told that the sheep had injured its head in some way and a fly had laid eggs in the wound. It was ghastly but the farm workers matter of fact attitude and their rough kindness to the animal a kind of reassured me.

@flutherother The sheep would almost certainly have been fine. Maggots eat only infected flesh, so they help to get the wound clean. They prevent the wound from healing however, so at some point you have to get them off so you can dress or stitch it.

A video of terrorists cutting off the head of a man. The man was hooded but still alive and I don’t think deeply sedated because several men held the body in place and the spraying and gush of blood was huge. The only thing to rival that was seeing the “goatse” video.

My first glimpse of Harleqins Ichthyosis while doing some research.

In person, a dead lamb being dragged across the pre-school yard in front of all the children by the maintenance crew.

@YARNLADY, what’s that (in the first paragraph of your answer)?

OMG. I have led a sheltered life.

@Drewseph A rare, horribly painful condition that some babies are born with (see the link, but only if you have a strong stomach).

@yarnlady is there any cure for that condition?? It doesn’t look as though the babies would survive very long in that state…

Obama’s inauguration.

@Frankie I have read a report about one person who did survive, but it is usually fatal.